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The Hakskeen Pan is the fastest place on earth. Or at least it might be, come 2013. Right now, it feels like the emptiest, eeriest place on the planet. If you drive out to the middle — a stone’s throw from Namibia in South Africa’s Northern Cape — and stand on the baked-flat mud surface, there is nothing around. Just some equally empty hills miles away in the distance, silhouetted against a grand, fiery African sunset. And when the car engine is shut off and the wind dies down, an unforgettable silence rattles your eardrums.

Half the trouble of setting a new land-speed record is finding a venue giant and flat and empty enough — you’d better be prepared to travel to some weird, distant, and inhospitable places. Royal Air Force Wing Commander Andy Green, already the world’s fastest man, went to four continents looking for somewhere to drive his new car, the Bloodhound, at 1000 mph. (To you speed freaks, that’s Mach 1.4, or 237 mph faster than Green’s current just-supersonic record.) Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats are too hard; Nevada’s Black Rock Desert too damaged. He nearly lost a rented Ford sedan in a Turkish salt pan that turned out to be too wet, and the chance of rain ruled out Australia’s dry Lake Eyre.

And then he found this place: the Hakskeen Pan, a 12-mile-long dry lake in South Africa’s Northern Cape, its biggest and least populous province, close to the Namibian and Botswanan borders. The region already has an odd mix of ancient and modern — loincloth-clad San bushmen roam its endless, empty landscape of copper-colored earth and scrubby sage. But the emptiness also brought NASA, which built a massive runway where a shuttle could land in an emergency. In the summer, when the Pan reliably hits 100 degrees, the big carmakers run their prototypes flat-out on the region’s laser-straight roads and circle a secret test track patrolled by helicopters with infrared cameras.

So, it’s already a pretty fast place, but the real action happens around the runway in Upington, 120 miles south of Hakskeen. There is no industry and very little agriculture here; rather, just the occasional gritty little settlement of a few dozen cinderblock bungalows where the only visible commercial activity is a convenience store. No wonder the local politicians have agreed to Andy Green’s plan: Clear a mile-wide strip of the Pan of the vicious little stones that cover it, and Green would bring the 1000-mph Bloodhound project to Hakskeen.

Whereas the sound of silence used to be deafening on the Pan, nowadays there’s the noise of dragging shovels and tinkling stones, as 300 locals clear about 9 square miles, the equivalent of a 30-foot-wide highway along America’s entire eastern seaboard. It is the largest area ever cleared by hand. In fact, Bloodhound will have set one world record before it has even turned a wheel. Nine miles of the world’s fastest track has already (mostly) been picked clean, and it will be finished after this year’s rains. The car may not have been built yet, nor funding completed, but suddenly Bloodhound seems a lot more credible and tangible than the other contenders for the land speed record (see sidebar).

But only one other member of the Bloodhound team has ever seen Hakskeen. My visit is also Green’s first visit since work started, so he has never driven fast on the surface. That’s where our Jaguar XJ Supersport comes into play. He thinks the surface is good, but doesn’t know, so doing even a fraction of Bloodhound’s speed in our supercharged Jag will be instructive. No one has been allowed to do a high-speed blast on the Pan before, nor will they again.

For all its mind-bending physics and statistics, Bloodhound is still a car in Green’s eyes. He actually talks about driving and steering it, as if those are easy feats in what is essentially a ground-traveling missile. But its dynamics are either better compared with aircraft or boats, or are simply unknowable, because nobody has ever gone so fast before, and we just don’t have the computer modeling power to predict. The proposed “car” is 36 feet long and rolls on solid aluminum wheels 3 feet in diameter. Power comes from a Cosworth Formula 1 engine, a jet engine from a Typhoon fighter good for 20,000 pounds of thrust, and, if those weren’t enough, a 27,000-pound-thrust solid-fuel rocket. The jet will get it up to about 350 mph, at which point the rocket will fire up. The F1 engine never actually drives the car, serving only to pump the liquid oxidizer for the 20 seconds the hybrid rocket is lit, because nothing else can throw in the high-test peroxide fast enough. Also around the 350-mph mark, the front wheels lose grip to the point they stop steering. Instead, the fairings start to work like rudders. According to Green, there’s a “nasty moment” of instability when the mechanical grip has declined but the car’s aerodynamics haven’t started to work properly — the wheels begin planing above the surface like a cigarette powerboat streaking across the sea. That’s lucky, given that four solid wheels spinning supersonic might liquefy the surface beneath them. Or they might liquefy themselves, since they’ll be experiencing 50,000 g radial acceleration at the rims. A wheel has never turned so fast. And what is truly unknowable is the effect the supersonic shockwave will have as it penetrates the ground — it might cause the track to explode beneath the car. There are just too many variables to make a prediction.

There’s something ghoulish and gladiatorial about land-speed-record attempts, for which we require a human to be aboard when in reality everything could be done by remote control. The land-speed record for an unmanned vehicle is Mach 8.5, set by a rocket-propelled sled at Edwards Air Force Base a few years ago. But nobody gives a monkey’s butt about that. This is not a job for Kimi Raikkonen — if there has to be a human aboard, you want the opposite of a racing driver, who might try to push the car beyond what it is safely capable of. You want a computer in human form: egoless, yet with the extraordinary mental and physical capacities required to execute a complex series of procedures in a short space of time when pulling up to 3 g, keeping the vehicle in a straight line while covering four-and-a-half soccer fields in a second, with enough extra mental power to analyze the car’s behavior.

You need Andy Green. He’s a mathematics grad from Oxford University, where he was a varsity rower; a Cold War Phantom and Tornado fighter pilot; the only man to break the speed of sound on land; and the RAF’s Chief of Staff in its operation to depose former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. He looks much younger than his 49 years, and obviously has been fit his entire life. Richard Noble, Bloodhound project director and a former land-speed record-holder at 633 mph in Thrust 2, recalls being astonished by how Green was able to provide a calm commentary while going supersonic in Thrust SSC, “when all I could do in Thrust 2 was hang on and try to keep the thing in a straight line.” When Green tells you his attempt is “not about proving how great I am,” you believe him. There’s an appealing nerdiness in the way he revels in his car’s insane engineering and physics. Imagine Lance Armstrong crossed with Bill Gates — it’s a relief when he answers questions in English rather than binary code.

The world’s fastest man has just spent a week of his post-Libya leave driving the world’s slowest minibus around South Africa on a lecture tour. Bloodhound bills itself as an education project designed to inspire future engineers and scientists as much as a land speed record attempt. Our drive from Upington to Hakskeen was supposed to be epic — like the first European explorers, we’d venture into the colorful but arid Kalahari, supplied only with water and the massive stash of biltong (cured meat) we’d bought in town. But unlike those first explorers, we had a supercharged Jaguar, so the journey was almost disappointingly quick.

Why an XJ? More like, why not? A supercar might struggle on poor roads, and an off-roader is unnecessary. So a big and powerful sedan made sense. And how can you not love this grandiose white limo with a 5.0-liter, 510-hp V-8 that rocks and crackles when given some throttle? Plus, it does a fair impression of the Space Shuttle when in motion, winding itself out to its 155-mph limiter in a little over 30 seconds, the gentle whine from the supercharger providing background music to the calm and quiet ride.

The XJ also feels pleasingly bulletproof, not something you could say of big Jags of the past. But mile after mile at V-max in 100-degree heat doesn’t make the temperature gauges budge. The fuel gauge does, though, and you really don’t want to run out of gas out here. The Moleskine notebook in which I’m writing this also holds very precise details on the locations and limited hours of the places that sell what passes for gas in the 180 miles between Upington and the Namibian border — all two of them.

Before we can go out onto the Pan, Green has to meet the local bigwigs and media at a nearby school. The premier of the Northern Cape arrives in a convoy of pricey SUVs; the school’s headmistress, by contrast, quietly shows me the water supply, which runs sporadically, and the tomatoes they grow to help feed the kids. When asked if they have a parent working on the track, nearly all 60 children raise their hands. You wonder how a place whose main industry is picking up stones will cope with the crowds that will come here in 2013. I hope they’ll be ready. The Northern Cape is the only province that didn’t host a World Cup game back in 2010. As Green says, “This is their World Cup.”

Andy then goes for a detailed inspection with Rudi, his project manager, and I start some recce runs in the XJ. As I drive down the track for the first time, I’m aware I will never get to do anything like this again. When you drive a car, you have boundaries — generally, a strip of asphalt, but even at organized salt-flat or dry-lake runs, there’s a line to follow. But here, all I can see ahead is a constant brown curve where the lake bed meets the hills or the horizon, and it looks like I’m free to drive at a limitless speed in any direction.

At the edge of the main 1500-foot-wide track small piles of gathered stones are waiting to be carted off. There are still some big, half-buried ones in the main track. About a third of the way down, there’s a rutted section where Rudi is leveling a causeway, which, before a proper road was built, once carried what little traffic there is up here over the Pan in the rainy season. But most of the time you can’t see any of this, and you’re in a constant state of mental turmoil about how far to push this unrepeatable opportunity. You know the dangers are out there and that you’ll arrive at them very quickly, but you’re not going to come here and not do a high-speed blast, right? In fact, it’s the disorientation that slows you most. Green will have a line of vegetable dye to follow, sprayed by a GPS-guided truck, but I have no idea if I’m heading straight down the track, or at a weird angle, until I pick up the line of stones. The Jaguar surges up to triple digits, traction control working hard on the dirt, but the wheels don’t noticeably break loose. In the rearview mirror, I can see the plume of dust we’re leaving, and occasionally, bizarrely, catch sight of the helicopter we’ve hired for the aerial shots in my sideview mirror as it follows me feet from the ground, the pilot even freer than I to indulge himself. I’m aware this big white whale streaking over the brown earth, dust billowing behind it, must look sensational, and I’d almost rather be up there looking down than down here in the driver’s seat looking up. In the end, 130 mph feels about right, with the car just starting to shimmy over the dust.

Now it’s Green’s turn, and I’m in the passenger seat. I have the nerve to point out a pile of rocks in the distance. “Yes, I have that,” he replies. Of course he does. He puts his right foot down, and we’re soon up to 130 mph. With an utter calmness, he notes, “The smoothness and crispness of the surface is amazing. You can hear in the wheel arches that we’re not throwing a lot up at all. The body’s not moving at all. There’s slightly more dust than I’d expected. This is definitely the fastest I’ve been on the Pan. We’re starting to struggle a little bit for grip, but it’s still very smooth — some ripples, but they’re very small. And feel how smooth it is when I take the power off and the car isn’t fighting itself. This is very encouraging.”

We back off and turn around to examine the surface’s reaction to 4400 pounds of Jaguar and passengers traveling at 130 mph. The crazy-cracked top layer has been displaced, but it’s only a few millimeters deep, and the mud beneath is rock solid. Andy crouches down and picks up the debris and runs it through his fingers. “This is exactly what we’re after. It’s just nice to confirm it.”

But Bloodhound will displace almost the same mass as our Jaguar at each wheel, and travel over this surface eight times as fast as we did. Green still doesn’t really know how the track he has chosen will react until he lights the rocket on Bloodhound, and I wonder how a man used to the certainties of mathematics and military life copes with the unknown. “It’s like the moment when Neil Armstrong stepped off the Eagle. There were still people who thought he would sink up to his neck in moon dust. He had a high degree of confidence, but he didn’t know until he’d left that first footprint. It’s amazing to be able to push back the boundaries of human endeavor, and make life more exciting by sharing it with people. It’s part of what makes us human. So why wouldn’t you take a chance like that? Why wouldn’t I?”

How To Stop from 1000 mph

Getting up to speed is one thing, but how do you stop quickly and safely from Mach 1.4? You rely on airbrakes, two parachutes, and a solid plan. Here is Team Bloodhound’s:

1000 mph: Close the throttle, which should result in an initial deceleration rate of 3 g.

800 mph: Begin deploying the side-mounted airbrakes, gradually increasing its area to maintain 3 g of deceleration through the transonic region (from 800 to 650 mph).

Below 600 mph: Deploy a parachute to increase the deceleration rate back up to 3 g.

Bloodhound isn’t the only car chasing the land-speed record. Here are more:

North American Eagle

This U.S. outfit is taking a pleasingly low-finance, grassroots approach to the land-speed record. It’s bought an ex-NASA F104 Starfighter jet, cut the wings off, and added wheels, including a set in the middle to counteract sagging. In 10 years, it’s achieved only 400 mph. It could go supersonic, but it won’t hit 1000 mph with “just” a jet.

Fossett LSR

Originally Craig Breedlove’s Spirit of America, it was bought by the late U.S. aviator and adventurer Steve Fossett, who rebuilt it and was preparing for a LSR attempt when he crashed his plane and died in 2007. Well-engineered and well-rated by the Bloodhound team, it could be yours for around $3 million, and, with a likely top end of 900 mph, you could be setting records this summer.

Aussie Invader 5R

This Aussie contender is already in build, and although owner Rosco McGlashan hasn’t yet nicked the LSR for Australia, he’s gathered plenty of experience trying. Ten tons of mass means he’ll need even more space than Bloodhound, and relying on rocket power alone will make the 5R a fight to drive. But it’s potentially capable of a four-digit speed.

Silver Bullet RV1

Another Aussie aiming for 1000 mph, this jet-powered JV1 forerunner is due to run late this year and is expected to take the Aussie LSR, showcasing some of the more advanced engineering from the rocket-only, 1000-mph RV1, such as rims that rotate around fixed hubs on air bearings and a detachable driver module that can fire itself free in an accident.

Jet Black

This new contender from New Zealand aims to top 1000 mph by 2016. A turbofan engine and two rockets will give a combined 60,000 pounds of thrust — around a third more than Bloodhound — and the only all-composite chassis currently proposed means it will have just 3.5 tons to propel.

Chasing the record by the numbers

44: Length, in feet, of the Bloodhound SSC.

394: Turning circle, in feet, of the Bloodhound SSC.

302: Weight, in pounds, of each aluminum wheel on the Bloodhound SSC.14,158: Weight, in pounds, of fully prepared Bloodhound SSC.

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